ITS conducted its first customer satisfaction survey of Lawrence faculty, staff, and students from March 28 through April 15, 2007. We intend to conduct the survey annually both as a way of staying in touch with our customers and in order to become aware of year-to-year and longer-term trends.
The survey was conducted via the Web using the university’s mrInterview survey tool. Overall participation was as follows:
Group |
# Invitations |
# Responses |
% Response |
Faculty |
212 |
70 |
33.0 |
Staff |
391 |
112 |
28.6 |
Students |
1412 |
395 |
28.0 |
Total |
2015 |
577 |
28.6 |
While we had hoped that response rates would be higher, we still gained much useful information from the survey in the form of both numerical ratings and an abundance of comments. The purposes of this document are to highlight key results from the survey and to offer some analysis of these results in the light of current and future ITS plans.
The survey (available on-line) was divided into four major sections:
The majority of questions were phrased identically for faculty, staff, and students. In a few cases, questions were added or adjusted on a per-constituency basis (e.g., students were not asked about their Lawrence-provided office telephone or office computer, staff and students were not asked about classroom technology, faculty and students were not asked about Banner and Brio.)
ITS has published a detailed report of the survey results on the Web.
Overall levels of satisfaction with ITS were high for faculty and staff and moderate for students (5=very satisfied; 4=satisfied; 3=neutral):
Has ITS service improved over the past year? Overall, faculty and staff thought so, while students on average thought service had remained about the same.
Technical ability and professionalism of staff: ITS staff received high marks from faculty and staff on these qualities, while students rate them somewhat lower.
Effectiveness of communication: Faculty and staff gave ITS a rating of about 3.8 (on a 5-point scale) in this area, whereas students’ average rating on this measure was only 3.12 (slightly better than neutral). Almost a quarter of student respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that ITS communicates effectively, whereas only about five percent of faculty or staff did so, and nearly half of students did not answer the questions about communications.
Major Issues identified:
In most cases, areas in which our constituents expressed lower satisfaction are also ones in which ITS has projects or programs in place to improve service. E.g.,
Our ability to make progress in each of these areas has been limited by the availability of financial and human resources. As a consequence, our strategy for equipping classrooms, expanding wireless access, and increasing Internet bandwidth has been an incremental one. Clearly demand in these areas is increasing faster than our ability to respond, but decisions about applying additional resources in these areas need to be made in the light of all the university's resources and all its needs.
Similarly, faculty enjoy a three-year replacement cycle for their office computers, whereas staff are on a four to five-year cycle. On that basis alone it is unremarkable to find staff less satisfied with their office equipment than faculty, because on average staff equipment is older. With more financial resources, that gap could be addressed directly.
Although improvements have recently been made in Voyager under the leadership of the Registrar, faculty dissatisfaction with the usability of Voyager remains a concern. At the same time, ITS is not responsible for Voyager in the same way that it is responsible for, say, wireless access or Internet bandwidth. Perhaps, however, we can provide leadership in engaging faculty, the provost’s office, student academic services, and the Registrar in working toward making Voyager more usable for faculty.
Communication with and support of students is another area to which we intend to give focused attention. In some ways, lower student satisfaction (in comparison with faculty and staff) should not be surprising because our support for student computing is more limited in scope than for faculty and staff. We note as well that a very large number of students did not answer the questions about communication, further strengthening the conclusion that there is an issue here. We surmise also that widespread dissatisfaction with network access in the late winter and early spring (dissatisfaction that was largely justified) affected student reports of their satisfaction with ITS in many dimensions.
Absent additional personnel or financial resources, support for students will continue for some time to be more limited than it is for faculty and staff. We can definitely improve our communication with students, however, and we intend to do so. During the summer we will engage our student staff, as well as one 2007 graduate who is joining the department, around this issue. We see this as a collaboration with the library staff to explore ways of providing students with more information and a better support experience with Lawrence ITS.
While student assessment of our communications effectiveness is lower than for the two other constituencies, measures of effectiveness from faculty and staff are not especially high either. So we will also be working this summer and next year on means of improving communications more broadly. One idea we are considering is a semi-annual ITS forum (with food!) at which we could report to the campus community and receive feedback.